/ 1 ( ,. ,: , , .1 / ' '; Z Jj / / -7"\ ,./ // . '/ / /1'" \ r r (AJ...þbJEL.L ., "Do you mind telling me where you're going with this?" . are filled with children's problems. Do you have bad dreams? Did you find your Christmas presents rather a let- down? Do you hate the new baby in your house? Do you wish you had dif- ferent parents? Is there something weird that lives under your bed and makes noises at night? If so, Joanne Rowling is thinking about you. Best of all is her treatment of the social nightmares of the schoolyard: cliques, bullying, os- tracism, kids who like to remind you that your family doesn't have much money. Such problems are perhaps more pressing in the English boarding school, on which Hogwarts is mod- elled. (Last year, in the Times Book Re- view, Pico Iyer claimed that Hogwarts was a near-exact rephca of Eton, where he did his time.) But the situation clearly rings a bell with Rowling's American readers, too. More, even, than the Potter books' sensitivity to preteen terrors, it is their wised-upness, their lack of sentimen- tality, that must appeal to Rowling's au- dience. However much they have to do with goodness, these are not prissy books. Harry lies to adults again and 76 THE NEW YOR.KER., JULY 31, 2000 . again. He also hates certain people, and Rowling hates them, too. Uncle Ver- non Dursley is not only cruel; he spits when he talks. Harry says the Dursleys wish him dead, and he's right. As for the forces of good, they are often well out of reach. In "The Sorcerer's Stone" there is a heart-stopping scene in which Harry comes upon a mirror, the so- called Mirror of Erised, and sees his dead parents in it. His father waves at him; his mother weeps and smiles. Reading this, you think, Oh, good, thank God-Harry's not really alone, not really an orphan. Yes, he's being hunted down by a remorseless villain- in each of the books, Voldemort pur- sues him-but his parents' spirits are there to protect him. Then Dumble- dore, Hogwarts's wise headmaster, ap- pears and tells Harry that the l\Ilirror of Erised shows us not what is but what we desire. (Read "Erised" backward.) Harry is alone. The great beauty of the Potter books is their wealth of imagination, their sheer, shining fullness. Rowling has said that the idea for the series came to her on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990, and that, even before she started writing the first volume, she spent years just working out the detaIls of Harry's world. We reap the harvest: the inventory of magical treats (Ice Mice, Jelly Slugs, Fizzing Whizbees- levitating sherbet balls) in the wizard candy store; the wide range of offerings (Dungbombs, HIccup Sweets, Nose- Biting Teacups) in the wizard joke store. Hogwarts is a grand, creepy cas- tle, a thousand years old, with more dungeons and secret passages than you can shake a stick at. There are a hun- dred and forty-two staircases, some of which go to different places on different days of the week. There are suits of armor that sing carols at Christmas- time, and get the words wrong. There are poltergeists-Peeves, for example, who busies himself jamming gum into keyholes. We also get ghosts, notably Nearly Headless Nick, whose execu- tioner didn't quite finish the job, so that Nick's head hangs by an "inch or so of ghostly skin and muscle"-it keeps flopping over his ruff-thus, to his grief, excluding him from participa- tion in the Headless Hunt, which is confined to the thorougWy decapitated. The Hogwarts staff is a display case all its own: Mad-Eye Moody, the pro- fessor of Defense Against the Dark Arts, who, apart from his ocular prob- lems, has a chunk of his nose missing and a wooden leg ending in a clawed foot; Rubeus Hagrid, the gentle-giant gamekeeper, with his pet, Norbert, a baby dragon, whom he feeds a bucket of brandy mixed with chicken blood every half hour. Norbert isn't the only monster. There are also centaurs, basi- lisks, and hippogriffs, together with hinkypunks, boggarts, and, my fa- vorites, the grindylows. Harry encoun- ters his first grindylow in a tank in a professor's office: "A sickly green crea- ture with sharp little horns had its face pressed against the glass, . . . flexing its long spindly fingers." (Later, the grindylow shakes its fist at him.) To deal with such encounters, and other life events, the students must learn many spells: "Expelliarmus," to get rid of something; "Waddiwasi," to extract gum from keyholes; "Peskipiksi Pester- nomi," to make pixies leave you alone. Hogwarts is a whole, bursting world. Most of Rowling's characters are